Monday, April 25, 2011

How To Measure Facebook Page Engagement

How To Measure Facebook Page Engagement: "

Are you trying to figure out how much your fans really like you or your brand? This guide outlines a few things you should never miss when monitoring your Facebook page performance.

Monitoring Active Users

While most companies pay attention to the number of fans as the greatest metric of success, measuring your active users is much more important. Fortunately, Facebook provides detailed information about daily, weekly, and monthly active users on your page. You can find this information in tFacebook’s insights area. While these numbers will differ from one page to the next, the most important thing is to strive to increase the number of active users you have.

The best way to accomplish this is to post regular high-quality updates that get users to post comments and likes.

Daily Story Feedback

While engagement numbers include the number of impressions you get on each post, your ultimate goal should be to boost likes and comments on each posting. Compelling content that drives people to respond to your posts is important to boosting your overall numbers. Ultimately, the more your fans engage with your content, the more people that will see it. One of the best ways to accomplish this is by asking questions which generate a significant response from your fans.

You can monitor all interactions on the main insights page as pictured below.

If you aren’t receiving comments or likes (relative to the size of your overall fan base), there’s a good chance that you’ll begin to see your post impressions drop. As such, comments and likes are the most important metrics to focus on.

Like Acquisition Channels

While the first thing you should focus on is increasing engagement among your existing fan base, you’ll want to also expand your reach. This comes through optimizing your various fan acquisition channels. Fortunately, Facebook provides detailed information about where your new fans are coming from. By visiting your insights area and then navigating to the area labeled “users,” you’ll be able to view the new likes sources chart (pictured below).

You should focus on two things: your largest sources and those sources with the greatest room for improvement. For our page, our blog is the greatest source of new fans. As such, we focus on optimizing the placement of likes around our website. For some pages, suggestions are the greatest source. For those pages, asking fans to refer their friends to your page can have significant results.

Monitor And Adjust

As you monitor your insights, you can make adjustments to the types of content you post over time. This can include the types of media (photos, videos, links/articles, status updates, etc), the time of day, and the frequency of posting. I highly recommend exporting this data to excel or another spreadsheet tool in order to track your performance over time. Alternatively, you can sign up for a free account with our AllFacebook Stats product which lets you track your page performance and your competitors’ page performance over time and export that data if necessary.

Do you have any questions or suggestions for other page administrators? Please post them in the comments section below!

How To Succeed At Facebook Page Marketing

If you want your fans to see your posts and interact with them, and if you want your page to be a positive place that helps you get more business, this post is for you.

How you manage your Facebook page is critical! If you do it well, the benefits are:

Engagement: Greater interaction

Visibility: Facebook shows your posts to more of your fans

Free fans: You get more fans for free — one Fortune 1000 company combining good advertising and engagement tactics got more than half of their fans for free.

Testimonials: Your fans become so positive that they give spontaneous testimonials which convince fans who are still just prospects how great you are

Reputation protetction: Overwhelming positivity on a fan page wards off negative attacks from critics and provides volunteer defenders

But if you post haphazardly, with no plan and no best practices, the risks are:

Silence: Your posts are ignored

Invisibility: Fewer fans see your posts (as few as 20 percent)

Higher costs: Your fan acquisition cost can be doubled because you miss out on the word-of-mouth potential

Underlying this fan page marketing strategy is the fact that: Your Facebook page posts are unlikely to be seen by fans who never like or comment on your posts.

Have you ever thought, “Oh, hey I haven’t seen so-and-so on Facebook lately!” and you go to their page and there is plenty they’ve posted that you haven’t seen?

You haven’t interacted with them enough for Facebook to know you care. So you comment or like something they’ve posted, and next thing you know, you’re seeing them in your news feed again.

That’s EdgeRank. Like it or hate it, you need interaction to remain visible.

Arousing Fans’ Desire for What You Offer

Don’t forget that all Fan Page posting is in the “D” phase of the AIDA marketing process.

Your job as a Facebook page marketer is to stimulate discussion and arouse DESIRE so that people are more likely to take action and buy or become a lead. In Social Media, strong sales messages are turn offs, so you need to work harder on the DESIRE phase.

How To Get More Interaction On Facebook Pages

With that in mind, how can you increase fan interaction with your Facebook page?

Questions

Contests

Interesting Content

Formulas

Ask Questions

Keep it simple (I like to call Facebook Marketing “No-Brainer Marketing” because complexity blocks comprehension and responses) and ask them about the Dream.

What is the Dream? It’s what your product or service makes possible for them. It’s not just the “benefits” aspect of copywriting terminology, but how they’d like their life or business to be and that your offering helps make possible for them.

For example: if you’re in real estate, instead of just talking about houses, talk about living by the lake, or living on the ocean, or a great safe fun neighborhood for kids. You might then ask questions like:

What do you look for in a neighborhood for your kids?

Would you enjoy living on a lake? Why or why not?

Woohoo! Walking from my house to the beach with my boogie board! What would you do at the beach today if you lived on the Ocean?

Contests

I’m not a big fan of contests for fan building, because unless the contest is built to only attract relevant fans, you get a lot of untargeted prize-seekers who probably aren’t your real prospects.

Facebook ads are the best way to build fans. Our Facebook marketing students who get profits all have used Facebook ads to target only people who are good prospects for their offerings.

But if you want to excite your existing fans and arouse their desire for your product, why not give one away? The people who enter and don’t win have effectively told themselves they really want it. If they don’t win, they’re more likely to buy than they were before the contest.

Interesting Content

Your job on the Facebook page is to lead the conversation.

To stimulate people, you need conversation pieces. Just like people put interesting objects on a coffee table or in their home to stimulate discussion, you need to post videos, pictures, and ideas to get people talking. Just make sure it moves the conversation toward their Dream or the Sale.

Formulas

The formulas that work so well for fan base building also work in posts. For example:

Click like if you love this picture!

Someone told me about a great example (I would give attribution if I knew where it came from!) that gets both Likes and Comments:

Click like if you think Kobe will score 30 tonight. If not, why not?

Putting It All Together

If you want to become a better Facebook marketer and sell more of what you offer so that you can enjoy business more and live the life you’re dreaming of, follow my advice above and also share this article with all your friends on Facebook!

See what I did there? That’s what I’m talking about: Benefits —> Dream —> Action

Brian Carter is chief executive officer of FanReach Facebook Marketing Courses.

Server Headers 101 (Infographic)

For newbies in the business of crafting websites, the purpose and technicality behind server header responses can often be a little mind baffling to get to grips with. Although there are essentially so much to learn, only a few are common and essential to web professionals and the average user.

So what is a server header response, anyway? Well, let’s shed some light on them by delving deep into the most common server header responses.

Click here to enlarge.

Infographic by SEOgadget, a boutique SEO agency and blog located in London and maintained by a small team of passionate tech geeks and search wizards.

About the Author

Oli Archibald is a search consultant and blog writer at SEOgadget. Follow them via Twitter as @SEOgadget for plenty of great articles on SEO, Excel, Microformats, and technology in general.

Using rewriteable URLs to help user experience and SEO

It doesn’t take much to send a story viral on Twitter, but a
recent quirk in the URL system at The Independent saw a flurry of humorous web
links scattered across the Twittersphere.

I was first alerted to the incident when one of our leading
techies at dotCommerce, Stuart Gill, sent
me a link that was doing the rounds on Twitter, seemingly exposing an
entertaining URL on a story about Kate Middleton’s head
in The Independent.

Namely:

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/utter-PR-fiction-but-people-love-this-shit-so-lets-just-print-it-2269573.html

While it
initially looks as though a sub-editor at the paper has been neglectful, this
is actually an example of a little URL rewriting feature that is common to lots
of content management systems.

As long as you have the numbers at the end, you
can put anything into the URL and it will still work normally.

For
example:

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/why-we-are-cancelling-our-Guardian-subscription-2269573.html

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/dotdigital-group-wins-national-business-awards-and-all-the-oscars-2269573.html

Not just for
the URL of it

Laughs
aside, URL rewriting is something that we, and many other websites, use quite
frequently. Why is this? At the basic marketing level, it allows us to generate
memorable URLs for campaigns or print marketing.

But,
with database-powered ecommerce sites, things get more interesting and the
trick becomes a lot more useful.

Addresses
UnfURLed

Take
Go Native for example, a website offering serviced
apartments we developed. Pages on the site are constructed automatically based
on the contents of a central database. However, this means you end up with URLs
classics like this:

http://www.gonative.com/property_searching/property_information_page.aspx?propertyId=10494

This
is actually an information page for the Forbes
Building in Aberdeen (their ID is 10494).

But
it’s a really ugly URL, so we do some magic using rewrites to change it to the
much prettier address:

http://www.gonative.com/apartment/the-forbes-building/10494/.

Note
you can put any text in the URL you want, and it still works:

http://www.gonative.com/apartment/land-of-the-gods-with-a-double-en-suite/10494/

Behind the
Scenes

So
what’s going on here?

The
logic is built into the URL format so that, no matter what is in the text
field, it’s the number ID that is searched for.

So
when the machine sees http://www.gonative.com/apartment/$text$/$number$/, it takes a look at the
last bit of the URL and returns the following:

http://www.gonative.com/property_searching/property_information_page.aspx?propertyId=$number$

Naturally,
the same works in reverse to ensure that the more complex URL is shown in
simple, user-friendly terms.

What are the
advantages?

1. It looks professional and it’s reassuring to users to see that the
URL contains the name of whatever they were searching for.

2. Google does catalogue these pages if they become popular (as the Independent found) so there’s SEO value
here. If the name of the search is in the URL, this may help your rankings. It
also means you can keep the URLs even if you change your CMS – so you don’t
throw away all your SEO juice.

3. It can, in some circumstances, help to secure your site. If URLs
become less easy to guess by potential hackers

At the end
of the day we’ve all had our fun, but let’s not forget the valuable role this
function serves for marketers every single day.

Oh go on
then, one more:

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/INSERT-SOMETHING-FUNNY-HERE
-2269573.html

Saturday, April 23, 2011

The Future of Geolocation: What is Coming?

Since location-based check-in app Foursquare was launched at South by Southwest in 2009, the app has seen exponential growth, reaching over 7.5 million users this year.

Other apps have been popping up as well, as geolocation takes center stage in the mobile arena and users flock to apps that create games from typical situations and offer rewards for users.

Two years later, check-ins are old news and the still-young area of geolocation is evolving to keep users interested. Apart from gamification through leaderboards and badges (or stickers, or pins), the motivation for users to participate in location-based networks is severely lacking.

Foursquare rewards users with badges for checking in.

Obviously the gaming aspect is a huge draw, as evidenced by the millions of users checking in across the globe, but developers continue to chase after our elusive social graph to make geolocation as indispensable as microblogging and photo sharing.

If there are any golden rules when it comes to geolocation, I would say they are 1)make it easy and 2) create value. Users want to put in less effort and receive more value. It’s up to both developers and businesses to do what they can to ensure these services have as few boundaries and as much value as possible.

In this article I’ve highlighted some of the ways developers are pushing toward these goals and what we can expect from the future of geolocation.

Recommendations

Possibly one of the most obvious and expected developments is the integration of recommended places to check in to. Foursquare’s most recent version includes a section called Explore, designed to recommend places around you based on your friends’ favorite places and your own check-in history.

Tell us what you're looking for and we'll help you find something nearby.

Scoville integrates with your Foursquare check-ins and collects your favorite places on a weekly basis. As more users sign up, these recommendations will create a ranking of places in each city, allowing Scoville to recommend check-ins based on popularity.

Scoville brings location and bookmarking together to help you keep track of favorite places.

Bizzy is trying a different angle, collecting place ratings and reviews as users leave a venue, through the check-out feature.

Bizzy recommends local businesses based on user ratings.

Some newer apps are focusing more on adding valuable content to recommendations, such as special offers or information. Lowffer recommends nearby deals and special offers based on user recommendations and your location, acting somewhat like a mobile Groupon app. Like Foursquare, a game-like leaderboard is emphasized to motivate user participation.

Deals and special offers with a local twist from Lowffer.

Groupon founder Andrew Mason has his own ideas about taking the popular deals site mobile, with the upcoming release of Groupon Now. Using Groupon’s successful deals focus, the new mobile app offers users two options: I’m hungry or I’m bored. Each option, combined with the user’s current location, returns special offers nearby.

The age-old human conundrum—where to eat lunch.

Like any other location-based app, the take-off will be slow until enough users get involved to make it worthwhile, but with Groupon’s proven success in the daily deals space, this could be the end of that all-too-common question, “What will I have for lunch today?”

Spot, another soon-to-launch app, is hoping to fill a gap some other apps have opened up by offering an easy way to collect location recommendations from friends and save them for later. Alan Danzis’ Wish List for Foursquare 4 suggests similar features that could be added to Foursquare’s next version, allowing users to recommend deals to friends and save their favorites, and providing check-in reminders.

Social Connections

Connecting with those who are already part of your social graph is pretty much expected when using geolocation apps, but connecting with strangers is a whole new game. Unlike recommendations, this is a feature that’s seeing somewhat unexpected traction in location-based apps. Following the success of sites like Chatroulette (for web-based conversations) and social networks like Twitter, it may not come as a surprise that meeting new people is a popular activity online, but using geolocation takes this much closer to crossing the cool-or-creepy line.

Randomized video conversations create new connections on Chatroulette.

Yobongo is one such app that’s slowly rolling out across the U.S. The premise of Yobongo is to create connections with strangers nearby, using your location to show other users around you. By setting up a room of 10 to 15 users, the app aims to help you break the ice and create new friendships. Founder Caleb Elston told GigaOM that offering up your location data to the app (but not other users) is a worthwhile trade for the value you get back.

Yobongo offers a location-based way to meet new people.

Taking this idea a step further is the Situationist app, which aims to bring strangers together to participate in random situations. Although the app is based on a political agenda, it offers simple tasks to complete to bring users together in a more casual way as well. Using your location data, the app alerts you to users nearby who have predetermined which situations they are comfortable with; for instance, hug me for 5 seconds, or let me inspect the contents of your bag for bombs and such.

Situationist app helps you create spontaneous connections.

Location-Based Info

Moving away from discovery and meeting new people, Glympse is designed to enable sharing location data with people you know. Using SMS or email, you can send a Glympse to any of your contacts, showing them a map of where you are, and where you’re going. The map updates using real-time GPS data to show when you’ve reached your destination and how long you will be there.

Glympse offers an easy solution for privately sharing your location.

This idea is taken a step further with Geoloqi, a mobile and web platform that works in the same way, but adds functions like Geonotes, layers and automatic Foursquare check-ins.

Geoloqi adds new functionality to sharing location data.

Automatic Foursquare check-ins is an impressive feature that we will likely see more of this year in various geolocation apps. By choosing your favorite Foursquare venues, you can set Geoloqi to automatically check you in 10 minutes after arriving, taking the effort out of check-ins without removing the reward.

A lesser-known feature of some of the more popular check-in apps, Geonotes is front-and-center in Geoloqi as a way to use location data to make your life easier. Using Geonotes, you can leave notes for your friends, which will show up when they arrive at a specified location. You can create reminders for yourself as well; for instance, reminding yourself to get milk when you arrive at the supermarket.

Task Ave is an iPhone app focused exclusively on this idea, but with future versions of Geoloqi (which is free to download) integrating with popular to-do app, Remember the Milk, I would be surprised to see anyone paying $2.99 for Task Ave.

Location-based tasks from Task Ave make your to-do list more manageable.

Push notifications and SMS alerts are proving to be popular for other purposes, as well. Location-based question-and-answer apps like LOCQL and LocalMind connect users to share information by asking and answering questions based on their location. Push notifications are used to alert users who have agreed to answer questions about a place when someone has a question, promoting both a social connection and the sharing of information.

The mobile advertising company Chalkboard publishes ads from local businesses inside supported apps when the user is within 1 mile of the store. Although this is a similar idea to previously mentioned Groupon Now, the focus of Chalkboard is taking the user action out of the equation, providing ads to users automatically, based on their location.

Mobile advertising goes local with Chalkboard.

Automatic Check-Ins

Chalkboard is not the only app taking the manual action out of geolocation. Geoloqi, as mentioned before, offers automatic check-ins for your favorite Foursquare venues, and will most likely add support for other popular check-in apps in the future.

RFID (radio-frequency identification) and NFC (near field communication) technologies are going to become much more popular as geolocation apps continue to evolve and developers look for ways to make sending and receiving location-based data easier. Both of these technologies allow communication (such as sending a post or completing a check-in) with a specified tag by just swiping a device, such as an NFC-enabled phone.

Foursquare has already begun testing NFC check-ins and Coca-Cola used RFID at last year’s Coca-Cola Village teen camp to enable Facebook Likes and status updates to be sent with wristbands.

Teenagers were given a plastic bracelet adorned with what resembled a Coke bottle cap. The cap was embedded with a 125 kHz passive RFID tag.

What Else Can We Expect?

There are some exciting innovations emerging in geolocation already, but there’s surely much more value to be had from this technology. Some of the developments I’m most interested to see are:

A collection of user-generated information about a place, like a location-based Wikipedia

Mobile check-in for flights, bypassing the long check-in counter queues

Mobile check-in at doctors’ offices, sending the secretary an automatic notification of your arrival

Mobile identification, providing entry to adult-only venues like nightclubs (our phones are already replacing cash, so why not our photo IDs?)

Digital, geotagged nightclub stamps to prove you’ve paid to get in

Bookmarking for places with push notifications, so you’ll finally remember to check out that café your friend keeps recommending

Interactive maps attached to promotional material (with QR codes?) so you can easily find the new pizza place that sent you coupons in the mail

Weigh In

What do you expect to see in the future of location-based services and what would you like to see? What tools or services would benefit your business most? Leave your comments in the box below.

Monday, March 21, 2011

Ignore SEO, just produce good content

Ignore SEO, just produce good content "

Producing content just to satisfy SEO targets and pressures is dangerous because that’s when you get into the realms of publishing content for content’s sake and clearly, Google doesn’t like that given its recent Farmer Update.

More importantly, your website users don’t like that. While SEO clearly has its place, it shouldn't get in the way of producing great content...

I was going to start this blog writing about why having quality content is so important and I’m still going to do that, I just hope I don’t eat my words in a few weeks time.

My opinion on content is and always will be this: if you’re in the content publishing business, always have content that you genuinely believe is interesting, that is useful, that is informative. It has to have a purpose, else why are you doing it?

Don't publish content for content’s sake

No-one can deny it’s easy to get pushed along by ideas that get chucked at you from within a business but sometimes you have to push back.I completely believe you shouldn’t be producing content for SEO; you should be producing it because it adds something to users of your website.

For example, say you’ve dropped in the rankings for one of your target keywords; the business’ automatic reaction is to want more content around that keyword. But, I’d fight against that, unless there is some relevance in producing content around said keyword.

Google is obviously punishing content farms, so don’t be one. If you feel you’ve strayed into this way of publishing content then seriously think twice about what you’re doing and why.

Put yourself in your customer’s or reader’s shoes

For me it’s simple. What is it you want to see when you visit a website? And are you doing that?

For example, if you sell car insurance then have a 30 second video on how to cut the cost of car insurance. That’s useful isn’t it? Don’t send customers an email with content they can read in a thousand other websites, that’s just insulting. Give them something they can’t get elsewhere. Give them quality.

Whatever you do when deciding what content to generate, don’t just do it for SEO. Don’t write an article and stuff it full of keywords because you have keyword targets to hit or have committed to producing x amount of articles about your products.

Some SEO agencies believe this is the way forward, I don’t. I believe this forces you to produce content that’s not necessarily relevant or interesting. Dreaming up ideas just to tick SEO targets isn’t how content is supposed to be produced. That’s not how the best publishers do it, and it’s not how you should do it either.

Getting the right people to help you produce content is also part of getting the content production process right, but that’s a discussion all in its own and one for another blog.

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Another Facebook infographic, and how the world is obsessed with Facebook

The World Is Obsessed With Facebook from Alex Trimpe on Vimeo.

Online Schools has created an infographic showing the far-reaching hands/tentacles of Facebook, and how the social networking website has become more than just a website. Some of these facts are quite an eye opener. Inspired by the infographic, Alex Trimpe created the video you can see above, while the infographic itself is embedded after the jump.

Via: Online Schools, LaughingSquid

Ullys' Online World